


A manner of speaking

by Tanaqui



Category: Earth 2 (TV 1994)
Genre: Community: spook_me, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-26
Updated: 2014-10-26
Packaged: 2018-02-22 17:20:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2515664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tanaqui/pseuds/Tanaqui
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When newcomers arrive on G889, those already on the planet struggle to make contact. Written for <a href="http://spook-me.dreamwidth.org/">Spook Me</a> and the creature prompt "alien".</p>
            </blockquote>





	A manner of speaking

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Scribbler for the beta.

The ground shudders again and again with strange and unwelcome blows. Not the work of water or wind or lightning, or even the scattered impacts from the decayed body of a distant comet. Such things are one with the soil, even as they transform it.

No, these beatings work against our world. We have felt them before, and no good has come of them, or from the aliens who make them. Aliens who would inflict on us and ours the same torture that has laid waste to their own homeland.

We count the impacts—three, four, five and more—and turn to each other to ask: _what now_?

oOo

We watch and listen, recalling all we remember of those who came before and how they treated us—and how we treated them.

Some of them had the sense to leave us and the land in peace, making a space for themselves that did not deal harshly with our home. We have treated them likewise, so long as they do not cause new grievances. 

Others... others put themselves at odds with us, bringing to our home the cruelty that saw them driven them from their kind. Bringing, too, their contempt for the ground beneath their feet. Our world would nourish them and heal them if they cared for it and were not greedy. Yet they cannot see beyond the moment and their own selfish needs, spreading their poisons and twisting the earth.

Most of these we have dealt with already, swiftly and with as little grief as we might accomplish; just as one would, without hesitation, pluck out a weed that threatened to overpower all else. 

There is one, though, who troubles us still: as cunning and watchful as we have learned to be, and thereby gaining a hold over us and over ours that we may not break by ourselves.

What will these new ones bring? Good or evil? We watch and listen—and find, among them... _hope_?

oOo

Hope. Yes, they bring hope with them: one we have waited for.

But they guard him carefully and we dare not approach openly, not yet. We remember too keenly what came before from among their kind, as well as the griefs our people suffer still. Nor can we speak to them: we grasp something of what passes in their petty, small minds, but these new ones are as deaf to us as their kin. Only when their minds are at rest from the endless busy-doing of the sun-hours do we come even somewhat near to touching. And even then, our voices are no more than faint whispers in the wind.

Except....

This one. In the dark hours, when his body is at rest, his mind is also. Not still turning, along the paths of the day and the paths of the past and the paths of their deepest fears, as the others do. Carefully we reach out....

oOo

We appointed those among us with the most skill in touching these primitive minds to speak for us. But he shies away, this one who can hear us, interpreting our mind-touch through the narrow lens with which he views the waking world. Twisting away, twisting away—his fear strong—as we extend our hands. And then fleeing from us, back to wakefulness.

No wonder they could work such evil on their world and ours, so blind are they to wind and water, soil and sun, the growing life around them....

It seems we must try another way.

oOo

We come to them. We show ourselves, our staffs dipped in sign of peace. Yet still they fear us: that is very clear, even though their minds are closed to us.

They send their creature, hewn from the earth and forged to do their bidding, to speak to us. It halts, observes us. There is such blankness there, though cold metal mimics living tissue and electrons course along thin-drawn wire in a poor imitation of life. While we may not comprehend clearly the minds of the beings who send it, at least there is true life in them. 

We cannot treat with this unnatural beast that is no beast, but the living ones will not come near enough to us to let us speak with gestures or drawn patterns in the sand or a touch. 

We must try another way. The child. If the child could come among us, even for one cycle of darkness, we could show faith by giving him what he needs and what his elders seek. And maybe also take what we need, to open a path that will lead to the future....

oOo

They guard him well. Always within the circle of his elders, where we might come, but at too great a cost, to us or them. He is beloved, this child: as precious to the kin that surround him as our home is to us.

We wait. We have patience, learned over the ages as the world turns, and as we feel the heat of the sun-days and the cold of the snow-days, and as the land renews and changes—and renews—with the slow-running seasons. These strangers to our world are not as we are: we have seen what their rashness, their incaution, their foolish quickness can bring. There will come a time when their watch fails.

oOo

There comes a time.

A time of darkness, when the minds of most of them are at rest from the sun-hours' busying, when our skilled speakers are reaching out again to the one who sometimes sees us in his mind's stillness. Yet that link is broken when the hurrying thought comes: _Now! Now! The child! He lies upon the earth, beyond the circle of care. Now!_

There is no time to be gentle, to be slow, to be mindful. Now! We must seize the moment. We must seize the child!

oOo

_Hush! Hush, little one. Hush. There is pain, yes. There is fear. But soon pain and fear will be gone. The sickness, the lack in you, will be cured by the earth, our earth, the good earth. Soon, yes, soon. Hush...._

oOo

We return him at last, healed. He is whole and we have a promise. In giving, we have received. 

**Author's Note:**

> As Devon says near the end of the pilot episode: "Four days ago, aliens landed on a distant planet, and we are them."


End file.
